Janus's Gaze
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preface Janus is the ancient Roman two- faced god—the god of the Origin who can also gaze at the End. According to Ovid, who put him on stage in the ﬁrst book of the Fasti,1 Janus symbolizes the doubleness of things, the passage between inside and outside, the transmutation and determina- tion of the elements emerging from primordial chaos (and “chaos” was, in fact, Janus’s old name). It doesn’t seem out of place to suggest an analogy between the doubled gaze of the mythical god and the political gaze of Carl Schmitt. The German jurist had the same ambivalent capac- ity to see the two faces of the “political,” the same ability to grasp the passage from formlessness to form, from chaos to order, from war to peace, as well as their fatal reversibility, which is to say, the passage from form to crisis. Schmitt’s theory—a “vision” that was, in his case, also an “experience”—was designed to ﬁt with the double face of the Modern itself. It can face the simultaneous disconnection and co- implication between Idea and contingency that generates and shoots through the Modern; moreover, it can face both the epochal compulsion for order and the impossibility of that order. The wisdom of this twofold gaze allowed Schmitt to see in modern politics both God and the absence of God; it allowed him to think politics as that energy which at once es- tablishes boundaries and transgresses them, which generates not only revolutions but also constitutions, which produces not only decisions but also forms. Schmitt shared with Janus not only a two- faced gaze but also a two- faced nature: Schmitt was himself double, both in his historical praxis and in his theoretical proposals, suspended between deconstruction and construction, between respect for tradition and boldness. In his continuous oscillation between predictability and unexpected blows,